Some people have seen some of my photographs of Shizuoka City and told me that I’m quite lucky to live in paradise.

I agree. I am lucky.

But wherever there’s nature, there’s beauty . . .

. . . and if there’s beauty around, you must be in paradise.

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Watkinsville, Georgia and the surrounding area (including a drive out to “Happy Valley”)—and taken a little hiking trip to Stone Mountain Park.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much nature there is to explore—in such short distances from your front door . . . wherever your front door is.

Easy to forget how close paradise is.

It’s good to remember what Henry Thoreau had to say about that.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them.

An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will cary me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.

A single farmouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.

There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, of the limits of an afternoon wlk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Cheers.